i run debian 13 on my laptop. it runs on a 5200rpm hard disk, so some bootup slowdown is to be expected, but it got really bad for some reason. booting up could take up to 3 minutes just to get to the display manager
after running systemd-analyze blame i found the two main culprits: docker and snapd. i had snapd and flatpak installed so that i could have access to as many applications as i could, but it seems that snaps have a huge amount of overhead. i knew about the one million mountpoints caused by snaps, but the amount of services they have to start on boot surprised me. snapd alone took 30 seconds to start and then there were its dependencies
my boot time is now down to 1min 50s. i recommend anyone who still has snapd installed on a non-ubuntu distro to uninstall it
i’m not doubting anything after i heard they snapified kernel modules
They’ve snapified coreutils too, and rewritten them in rust (uutils). It’s proving to be a challenging transition…
Edit: While the article mentions rust’s vaunted memory safety as a driver, I can’t help but notice that uutils is licensed MIT, as opposed to GNU’s coreutils license being GPL v3.
While snapd is licensed GPL v3, it’s important to note that despite the ‘d’ suffix, it’s barely a daemon. It’s mostly a client for the snap backend - which is proprietarially licensed and only hosted with Canonical. The snapd client could be replaced at any time.
Canonical does a lot of bad shit, but switching to uutils is not one of them. The “challenges” are expected because it’s going in a non-LTS release, which is basically meant to be a beta of the next LTS. And those challenges are being quickly addressed as they’re being surfaced. This is exactly the right way to introduce something new, IMO.
I don’t like the uutils pushover license license though :/